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Public Testimony Before 9/11 Panel

Published: March 23, 2004

(Page 23 of 69)

The strategy would recognize the need for significant aid, not only for the Northern Alliance, but to other tribal groups that might help us with this. It would also include greatly expanding intelligence and authorities, capabilities and funding. While all this was taking place, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, we did everything we could to protect the lives of American citizens around the world. As you know, the threat information that we were receiving from the CIA and other sources suggested that we were increasingly at risk and the risk was -- looked to be mostly overseas.

POWELL: And, while that is my responsibility, others in our administration were looking at the threat within the United States. But in response to these overseas threats, we issued threat warnings constantly. Every time the threat level went up, we would respond with appropriate threat warnings to our embassies, to our citizens around the world who were traveling or living on foreign countries, warning them of the nature of the threat and encouraging them to take the necessary caution. So, it is not as if we weren't responding to the threat. We were responding to the threat in the way that we could respond to the threat: with warnings, with emergency action committee meetings in our embassies to make sure that we were buttoning down and buttoning up. Mr. Chairman, this all continued throughout the summer. It reached a conclusion in early September, when all the pieces of our strategy came together: the intelligence part, the diplomatic part, military components of it, law enforcement, the nature of the challenge we had before us which was to eliminate Al Qaida. It all came together on the 4th of September, at a principals meeting, where we concluded our work on the national security directive that would be telling everybody in the administration what we were going to do as we moved forward. It took us roughly eight months to get to that point, but it was a solid eight months of dedicated work to bring us to that point. And then, as we all know, 9/11 hit and we had to accelerate all of our efforts and go onto a different kind of footing altogether. I just might point out that, with respect to Pakistan, consistent with the decisions that we had made in early September, after 9/11, within two days, Mr. Armitage had contacted the Pakistani intelligence chiefs who happened to be in the United States and laid out what we now needed from Pakistan. The time for diplomacy and discussions were over; we needed immediate action. And Mr. Armitage laid out seven specific steps for Pakistan to take to join us in this effort.

POWELL: We gave them 24, 48 hours to consider it and then I called President Musharraf and said, We need your answer now. We need you as part of this campaign, this crusade. And President Musharraf made a historic and strategic decision that evening when I spoke to him and changed his policy and became a partner in this effort as opposed to a hindrance to the effort. Mr. Chairman, I have to also say that we were successful during this period in rounding up international support. The OAS, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the United Nations, NATO, the entire international community rallied to our effort. To summarize all of this, Mr. Chairman, I might say that this administration came in fully recognizing the threat presented to the United States and its interests and allies around the world by terrorism. We went to work on it immediately. The president made it clear that it was a high priority. The interagency group was working. We had continuity in our counterterrorism institutions and organizations. We kept demarching as was done in the previous administration. But while we were demarching and while we were doing intelligence activities to disrupt, we were putting in place a comprehensive strategy that pulled all of these things together in a more aggressive way and in a way that would go after this threat in order to destroy it and not just keep demarching it. We had eight or so months to do that, and in early September, that strategy came together. And when 9/11 hit us and brought us to that terrible day that none of us will ever forget, that strategy was ready and it was the basis upon which we went forward and we could accelerate all of our efforts. While I was warning embassies and taking cover in our embassies in response to the threats, Secretary Rumsfeld was doing the same thing with military forces. Director Tenet was doing the same thing with his assets around the world. And our domestic agencies, the FBI, the FAA were also looking at what they needed to protect the nation. Most of us still thought that the principal threat was outside of the country. We didn't know while we were going through this procedure and through these policies in putting together this comprehensive strategy that those who were going to perpetrate 9/11 were already in the country, had been in the country for some time, and were hard at work. Anything we might have done against Al Qaida during this period, against Osama bin Laden may or may not have any influence on these people who were already in the country, already had their instructions, had already burrowed in and were getting ready to commit the crimes that we saw on 9/11. Nevertheless, we knew that Al Qaida was ultimately the source of this kind of terror and we determined to go after it.